At least part of it is likely demographics. When dining with family, as an obvious familial unit, I think there’s rarely been a time when a server has asked about the check.

One of the topics Sterling covers is the state of Steam, and the terrible games that are allowed to populate the storefront, crowding out good games and making them more difficult to find by users, despite Steam at least paying lip service towards not wanting those games on the service and promising that the “good”…

One of the articles I read stated that certain international stores, especially the ones in SE Asia, are actually independent from the main chain in North America, and so will be unaffected.

The fact hobby stores already went through their bubble likely means that’s true.

They fit in the niche of young to middle aged adults who are into popular culture and want to have knick knacks, but aren’t into precious moments or hummel figurines, and don’t want to go the full blown $100+ posable figure route either due to cost or a need to appear at least a little less “geeky”.

The irony is that from what I’ve heard, Amazon is actually very good at knowing what’s selling where, and moving merch around so it’s closer to where it’s more popular so it can get to high demand areas faster.

It’s really going to depend on how they do the liquidation. A lot of stores in my area that have gone under seem to hire a second company to handle it (either by choice or perhaps at behest of the creditors), who strip the best merch and sell it off directly to other retailers or something, then staff the store with…

That sounds a lot like when automobiles started transitioning from manual being the only option to the early automatic transmissions.

The issue is, is that they’ve tried to do all of this. They wanted to eliminate saturday delivery. They wanted to close small rural freestanding post offices and consolidate services, either by grouping post offices into a single location that serves a wider geographical area, or by allowing private businesses to…

I hope you continue to catalog the production value increases each week, which will hopefully include an eventual move out of the goblin bunker and into the goblin lair, which will have enough square footage to resolve the lighting reflection issues.

Because the post office is required to provide a service, whether there’s a direct line item profit in it, or not.

Because the USPS is a hybrid organization that is fully self funded but unable to change rules (like reducing the amount of days mail is delivered) without congressional approval, which is not going to be forthcoming because various constituencies would get upset without being able to highlight their day with a trip…

It looks like the rear sliding door was modified, in part to make room for the modified front right side door, which also looks like it slides.

The imprisonment of the poor in part for being poor is a whole separate issue currently being worked on.

Is this that fabled “public transportation” of which you speak? That thing which doesn’t really exist in Michigan outside of some specific metro areas since everyone is just assumed to have a car?

Some people enjoy indulging in a good bout of schadenfreude.

I don’t think he’d be lucky enough to find someone selling a winch and also willing to throw in a rusty hunk of jeep for free.

There’s also the spark, the yaris, the mirage, and the rio. None of them are sub-10k however, but they’re as close as we get I think.

It doesn’t help that they still are subject to getting certain business decisions cleared by the government before they can get implemented, plus that messy business with the way they’re mandated to fund pensions.

I’m pretty sure they make money on the finance end as well, kind of like how a lot of banks will kick you some cash if you get a friend to open up an account with them.